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Monitoring global carbon emissions in 2021

Following record-level declines in 2020, near-real-time data indicate that global CO2 emissions rebounded by 4.8% in 2021, reaching 34.9 GtCO2. These 2021 emissions consumed 8.7% of the remaining carbon budget for limiting anthropogenic warming to 1.5 °C, which if current trajectories continue, might be used up in 9.5 years at 67% likelihood.

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Fig. 1: Global CO2 and CH4 emission trends.

References

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank those that contributed to the 2020 and 2021 Carbon Monitor dataset. We acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant 41921005 and 71874097), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (JQ19032) and the Qiu Shi Science & Technologies Foundation.

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Correspondence to Zhu Liu.

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Carbon Monitor: https://carbonmonitor.org/

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Liu, Z., Deng, Z., Davis, S.J. et al. Monitoring global carbon emissions in 2021. Nat Rev Earth Environ 3, 217–219 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00285-w

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